SeventyTwoTrillion

yep

congratulations lol

Israel is seeking to establish a port in the Mediterranean island country of Cyprus in case the port of Haifa is closed in a war with Hezbollah, Israel Hayom reported on 11 March. The Ministry of Transport has set a goal to establish another port for Israel in Larnaca within 60 days. The establishment of the port is meant to coincide with US plans to establish a floating port off the coast of Gaza, allegedly to deliver aid to millions of besieged and famine-stricken Palestinians.

A delegation from the Israeli Ministry of Transportation and Road Safety, led by the chairman of the Israel Ports Company, Uzi Itzhaki, left for Cyprus on Monday. The port is expected to cost hundreds of millions of shekels, and efforts to establish it will be carried out immediately. The delegation seeks to establish the port in response to security scenarios provided by the ministry’s head, Miri Regev. Establishing a port in Larnaca is an urgent need for Israel to avoid a wartime situation where it is cut off from commercial and military supplies. Specifically, Israel fears a situation where the Haifa port in northern Israel is closed due to a full-scale war with Hezbollah.

The Ashdod port was closed following the Hamas-led 7 October attack, forcing Israel to redirect shipping to Eilat. The port in Eilat was then targeted by Ansarallah-led Yemeni forces. Contrary to news reports, the main goal in establishing the Cyprus port is not to transfer aid to Gaza. A source familiar with the matter told Israel Hayom that Israel also intends the Larnaca port to be part of an alternative transportation axis to connect Europe and India through Israel. Israel hopes to establish such a route within the framework of a future normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia.

I'm confused by this. Cyprus is an island that is disconnected from Israel by a body of water. How does a port on Cyprus give Israel the ability to receive maritime goods? Is it to do with being able to unload big container ships and then send those supplies in smaller boats to Israel?

I also like this line:

alternative transportation axis to connect Europe and India through Israel. Israel hopes to establish such a route within the framework of a future normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia.

Yeah, good luck with that. While non-Western ships go through the Suez Canal at low costs, you'll be stuck in traffic jams between the UAE and Israel trying to make your shitty land route work.

The Israeli army is preparing "contingency plans" to launch a wide-scale attack on Lebanon, including preparing shelters and food for Israeli residents of northern settlements, Yedioth Ahronoth reported on 10 March.

In a meeting Saturday with settler leaders from the Mata Asher and Ma'ale Yosef regional councils, Israeli Army Northern Command head Major General Ori Gordin stated, "We are preparing contingency plans to launch an attack in Lebanon. Our commitment, mine, is to change the security situation so that the residents can be returned home." In preparing for a potential war with Hezbollah in northern Israel, the army is launching "Operation Steady Anchor" to establish dozens of mass shelters, mainly in underground parking lots, to which the residents can flee to escape Hezbollah missile fire. Hezbollah is estimated to have some 150,000 rockets and ballistic missiles capable of causing massive damage to Israeli cities, including Haifa and Tel Aviv.

According to Yedioth Ahronoth, the plan was formulated and budgeted in the last two months. Plans to host displaced settlers in hotels and tents outside the possible conflict zone were dismissed as unworkable. Most Israeli hotels are full as they are housing settlers displaced from Israel's south near the Gaza border. The preparations come days after Israel informed its western sponsors of a 15 March deadline to reach "a political settlement with Lebanon," after which Tel Aviv says it plans to "escalate military operations to a broad war," according to western diplomats who spoke with Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar. But Hezbollah has vowed not to back down from Israeli threats. "The position is clear. As long as the war continues in Gaza, this means that the Lebanon front is affected by it, and when it stops in Gaza, it stops in Lebanon," Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem told Lebanese news channel LBCI. "When there is a truce in Gaza, we will have a truce."

"We are not closer to a total war in Lebanon, but we are prepared for it if it happens tomorrow,” Qassem said on 6 March.

Cool Zone potentially imminent.

I'm interested in the implication of needing dozens of mass shelters for Israelis. I would have personally imagined that Hezbollah would be spending missiles taking out infrastructure and military bases, not trying to kill civilians under the assumption that if they hit a certain number, the You Win screen pops up and they earn 1000 points and therefore don't have to actually fight militarily (which seems to be Israel's miserably incompetent strategy in Gaza).

Though I guess if/when Israel starts carpetbombing Beirut in a couple weeks, that might start a tit-for-tat where Hezbollah also kills Israel civilians? I don't know.

Next thread here.

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The Country of the Week is Portugal!

Feel free to post or recommend any books, essays, studies, articles, and even stories related to Portugal.

If you know a lot about the country and want to share your knowledge and opinions, here are some questions to get you started if you wish:

• What is the general ideology of the political elite? Do they tend to be protectionist nationalists, or are they more free trade globalists? Are they compradors put there by foreign powers? Are they socialists with wide support by the population?
• What are the most important domestic political issues that make the country different from other places in the region or world? Are there any peculiar problems that have continued existing despite years or decades with different parties?
• Is the country generally stable? Are there large daily protests or are things calm on average? Is the ruling party/coalition generally harmonious or are there frequent arguments or even threats?
• Is there a particular country to which this country has a very impactful relationship over the years, for good or bad reasons? Which one, and why?
• What are the political factions in the country? What are the major parties, and what segments of the country do they attract?
• Are there any smaller parties that nonetheless have had significant influence? Are there notable separatist movements?
• How socially progressive or conservative is the country generally? To what degree is there equality between men and women, as well as different races and ethnic groups? Are LGBTQIA+ rights protected?
• Give a basic overview of the last 50 or 100 years. What's the historical trend of politics, the economy, social issues, etc - rise or decline? Were they always independent or were they once occupied, and how have things been since independence if applicable?
• If you want, go even further back in history. Were there any kingdoms or empires that once governed the area?

Recommend some books on Portugal if you know of any! For now, here's some regional European books from our reading list:

• The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 by Michael Hogan (1987).
• NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe by Ganser Daniele (2004).
• Liberating Sapmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North by Gabriel Kuhn (2020).
• On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock (2023).
• The Western Soviets: Workers’ Councils Versus Parliament, 1915-20 by Donny Gluckstein (1985).
• Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 by Christopher Clark (2023).

Luckily, Israel won't exist post-conflict

Your Sunday Briefing

Also here on the website.

A huge jobs massacre is looming in German industry. Hundreds of thousands of jobs, some of them highly skilled, are at stake. The main focus is on the gutting of jobs in the automotive and parts industry, where—not including repair shops, petrol stations, trade and sales—more than 800,000 people are employed. Depending on the source and forecast, more than half of these jobs are at risk.

However, the layoffs are not limited to the automotive sector. The chemical, steel, construction, household appliances and even the IT sector are also affected. In retail, in the health sector, where dozens of hospitals are threatened with bankruptcy, and in rail freight, tens of thousands of jobs are also at risk.

The job massacre ranges from the factories to administration and development centres. “Suddenly, mid-level executives and experienced engineers are also at risk of losing their jobs,” writes the Handelsblatt, which published an extensive article on the subject at the end of February under the headline “And out you are – The new wave of staff reductions.”

“Those in the current wave of dismissals don’t just wear overalls, but more often than not also a suit, lab coat or hoodie,” according to the Handelsblatt. Citing labour market experts, it warned against the illusion “that most of the affected employees can easily switch to other vacancies.” Even if this were the case, “then these new jobs are often paid significantly less than the traditional position in the large corporation.”

...

According to a survey by the Institute of the German Economy (IW), only five out of 47 industry associations expect an increase in the number of employees in 2024, and 23 industries expect a reduction, including such employment-intensive sectors as wholesale and retail, machine manufacture, trades and construction. Credit insurer Allianz Trade expects the number of insolvencies in Germany to rise to 20,260 in 2024. That is 5 per cent more than in the previous year.

Armenia is considering seeking EU membership, foreign minister says

Armenia is considering applying for European Union membership, foreign minister Ararat Mirzoyan said on Friday (8 March), as it seeks to forge closer ties with the West in the face of tensions with traditional ally Russia.

“Many new opportunities are largely being discussed in Armenia nowadays and that will not be a secret if I say that includes membership in the European Union,” Mirzoyan said in an interview with Turkey’s TRT World television station.

Nima Shirazi talked with the Real News Network on Iran and the Resistance Axis: Demystifying Iran and the ‘Resistance Axis’. It's a very long interview and discussion but I like this part:

Nima Shirazi: Yeah. Iran is a large country with 80-plus million people. It has its own interests as a nation-state. Its government has its own interests domestically and internationally. There are all manner of different political persuasions and different perspectives on things within the country and within its people. To say that Iran has one thing that it wants to do is a way to flatten reality so that we can somehow after the Cold War ended, have a new, big, bad puppet master enemy. You don’t have the Soviet Union anymore, you don’t have communism in that way anymore, therefore, the political narrative switches to worrying about Iran and worrying about Islamism.

But so much of what this does is self-perpetuating because by casting Iran, its government, and also its people – And let’s be clear about this – The US and its allies and affiliated media arms love to do this thing where there’s the government and then the people. No, we’re not talking about the people; We love the people, we’re just talking about the government. But then everything we do is attacking the people. Every sanction, every missile strike, every drone attack attacks people. So that is a way to disassociate and dismiss out of hand, this idea that our interests, US interests, and Western interests are not fully bent on domination. They care about the freedom, love, and peace of people around the world. Okay. But with that in mind, this constant drumbeat of Iran can’t be trusted, Iran is our enemy, Iran is in charge, Iran is in control. One of my favorite terms herein that Wall Street Journal piece is the “land bridge.” You mean like, earth? [Max laughs] Okay. Cool.

Maximillian Alvarez: Also known as land [all laugh].

Nima Shirazi: Yeah. Like, okay. The land bridge between New York and Los Angeles is ripe with Americans [Max laughs]. Whoa, it’s fucked up. They built a land bridge. So all of this serves the purpose of not only refusing to change the perception of an enemy state to keep that threat ever present. So that American interests, American actions, Israeli interests and actions, and Saudi interests and actions can be perennially justified. Anything they do can be justified. It is reasonable to act in this way because of big, bad Iran. But also what that does, much in the way that we see the US political machines and media talk about Latin and South America, when there are socialist governments challenging American hegemony, those countries have been under threat. Their governments and their people have been under threat and under attack for so long and never allowed to fully realize the nation-states that they could have, with the popular representation that they could have, with the aspirations of the people enacted in the way that the people get to decide because they are constantly under threat.

Being constantly under threat serves a real political purpose not only for the US threatening those countries but also within those countries. Because the people and governments of those countries are always under siege, and therefore, what you see is this idea that what Iran could be is not allowed to be realized on purpose because it is constantly under sanction and under threat. The fact that Iran still maintains this terrifying persona in the American political power structure psyche is a real testament to how much resistance Iran has been able to maintain, that it has not been regime changed, it has not been occupied. So it’s important to realize that this threat narrative not only threatens people within those countries and whatever spectrum of political interests they have for aspirations of stronger democratic representation, of different relations with other countries in the world, that is done on purpose; Exacted from the outside onto those countries to stifle the natural course of the way that nation-states evolve.

Michael Roberts' latest piece on China, where he dunks pretty hard on Western China Understanders. It is genuinely bewildering that these economists are giving economic advice to a country that is beating them in many ways, while that same advice is used in the West and is producing stagnation and recession. I get that these people don't give a shit about the actual economy and are merely focussed on funnelling more profits into the top 0.01% with all this fancy jargon as a smokescreen, but you'd think cognitive dissonance would kick in at some point.

Like, Russia is doing better than you! The same country that you predicted would experience unsalvageable economic collapses in 2022 is now doing considerably better than you in economic growth! If I was in their position and had even a shred of dignity, I'd say "Fuck. Well, my economic theory doesn't seem to be working, then. Let's see if there are any better ones, which are predicting events better than me."

Can China succeed in achieving both its growth target for this year and reach the longer-term objectives over the next ten years or so, taking nearly 1.4bn people up to living standards only enjoyed by a small group of nations in Europe, North America and East Asia?

If you were to read the Western press and their economists, you would conclude that the chances of China doing that are no better than a snowball surviving on being thrown into the sun. It is the almost unanimous cry of Western economists, particularly the ‘China experts’, that the China ‘miracle’ is over, and worse, China is heading into a debt deflation spiral that will mean growth targets will not be met at best, and more likely there will be a major slump. This is despite the fact that in 2023 China had an official growth rate of 5.2%, more than double that of the ‘booming’ US economy, and five times the rate of growth in the rest of top capitalist economies of the G7. (Don’t get me into the argument that China’s growth figure is fake and growth is much lower. Those that argue this have little supporting evidence.)

Ah, but you see, manufacturing is in recession (as measured by official surveys), consumption is weak (still below pre-pandemic levels) and foreign investment, seen as the life-blood for the Chinese economy has dried up. And even worse, prices of goods and services are falling. Readers may be surprised to hear that Western economists, who spend much of their time demanding that inflation rates in their countries be reduced to no more than 2% a year after the post-COVID inflationary spiral of the last three years, see no merit in the lack of any rising prices (and therefore rising real wages) in the Chinese economy: it’s ‘inflation bad for the US; but no inflation bad for China’.

In a recent article, John Ross has shown that to achieve China’s Plan GDP target for 2025 ie a doubling GDP from 2021, it would require an average annual growth of 4.7% a year. So far, China is ahead of this goal with annual average growth in 2020-2023 of about 5%. Indeed, since the beginning of the pandemic, China’s economy has grown by 20.1% and the U.S. by 8.1%—that is China’s total GDP growth since the beginning of the pandemic has been two and half times greater than the US.

Yes, China’s annual growth rates have slowed from the breakneck pace of the 1990s onwards and the Chinese workforce is declining. But just look the increase in GDP per person that China has achieved compared to the G7 economies since 2019, some of which have even contracted (IMF data). The rise on per capita basis is even higher against the US (nearly four times).

Yes, increasingly China cannot rely on an expansion of a cheap workforce from rural areas to achieve more output, but instead must raise the productivity of the existing labour force, especially through investment in technical innovation. And it is doing so. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows that ‘total factor productivity’ (which is a crude measure of innovation) is growing at 6% a year, while it has been falling in the US.

Despite this evidence, every year the Western ‘China’ experts (and even many in China itself) predict stagnation, given the huge debt levels in all sectors. China is going to stagnate like Japan has done in the last three decades. The only way to avoid ‘Japanification’, say these experts, is to ‘rebalance’ the economy from ‘over-investment’, ‘excessive savings’ and exports to a domestic consumer-led economy as in the West and reduce the state control of the economy so that the private sector can flourish.

This year on the occasion of the NPC, Martin Wolf, the Keynesian guru of the Financial Times, returned to this theme, echoing the arguments of other Keynesian China experts like Michael Pettis. According to Wolf, China’s growth will now slow to a trickle as in Japan because it overloaded with excessive debt and because it has not rebalanced the economy towards “the consumer”. China needs to get its consumption share up to Western levels or it will not be able to grow and so stay locked in a ‘middle income’ trap.

...

But how can anybody claim that the mature ‘consumer-led’ economies of the G7 have been successful in achieving steady and fast economic growth, or that real wages and consumption growth have been stronger there? Indeed, in the G7, consumption has failed to drive economic growth and wages have stagnated in real terms over the last ten years, while real wages in China have shot up. Moreover, these consumer-led economies have been hit by regular and recurring slumps in production that have lost trillions in output and income for their populations. The irony is that China’s consumption growth rate is way higher than in the G7 economies.

China has not had a contraction in national income in any year since 1976, while the consumer-led G7 economies have had slumps in 1980-2, 1991, 2001, 2008-9 and 2020. Much has been made of China’s ‘disastrous’ zero COVID policy. But apart from saving millions of lives, China still did not enter a slump in 2020, unlike all the G7 economies in 2020.

...

Moreover, the arguments of the Western experts that China is stuck in an old model of investment-led export manufacturing and needs to ‘rebalance’ towards a consumer-led domestic economy where the private sector has a free rein are just not empirically valid. Is China’s weak consumer sector forcing it to try and export manufacturing ‘over capacity’? Not according to a recent study by Richard Baldwin. He finds that the export-led model did operate up to 2006, but since then domestic sales have boomed, so that the exports to GDP ratio has actually fallen. “Chinese consumption of Chinese manufactured goods has grown faster than Chinese production for almost two decades. Far from being unable to absorb the production, Chinese domestic consumption of made-in-China goods has grown MUCH faster than the output of China’s manufacturing sector.”

There's more in the article for enjoyers of Chinese economics statistics, but to summarize the argument, I think it's really as simple as: China needs to do the exact opposite of whatever Western economists are telling them to do.

It would be wrong to say that neoliberal economics "doesn't work", because it's actually working stunningly well at its real purpose, which is accumulating profit and repressing the working class, despite failing dramatically and increasingly regularly at its stated purpose, which is some hand-wavey shit about economic growth and stability or whatever. But the contradiction between these two points can only be delayed so long as you don't have a major competitor. Once you do, you must institute a different kind of economics which actually does produce economic growth across society and has some provisions for labor, which is of course the real motive force of the entire economy, because it's now in your material interests to do so in order to maintain imperialism and monopolies.

I'm unsure what the breaking point will be, or when it will happen, but a war against China (proxy or otherwise) seems like a pretty safe bet. The only thing then is whether the current class of capitalists will resist this new state of affairs, and doom Western hegemony, or accept it, plunging us into the biggest Cool Zone of human history with a reinvigorated American working class slaving away for an American bourgeoisie fighting against a Chinese communist superpower.

According to a new study by University of California Riverside researchers, roughly two weeks of training for GPT-3 consumed about 700,000 liters of freshwater. The global AI demand is projected by 2027 to account for 4.2-6.6 billion cubic meters of water withdrawal, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of Denmark or half of the United Kingdom.

Much of the water to cool the cloud is lost in steam emissions “where the water will evaporate and remove the heat from the data center to the environment,” according to one of the authors of the study, Shaolei Ren.

Other research has pointed out the growing carbon footprint of AI. For example, in 2019, researchers found that training one of the larger AI models can emit as much greenhouse gas as five average American cars over their entire lifetimes.